Ahmed’s Story

For weeks he had hidden in a more traditional way–at his sister’s house. Saddam’s regime was looking for him. A local Baath party leader had seen Ahmed agitate against the regime and notified Iraqi intelligence. They had his name.

When the authorities came to Ahmed’s house, they asked his father where he was hiding. His father pleaded ignorance. Being less concerned with punishing the actual revolutionary than with simply inflicting punishment on someone, they took Ahmed’s brother, Ali. He was tortured for a week–hung from the ceiling with his arms tied behind his back. One of his arms was broken. Days later, he was led to the front of a local government building which functioned as a site for public executions. As he was led to the tall, wooden post where he would be tied, he stared at the horrific reminders of his ill-fated predecessors: Directly behind the support pole, the wall was painted with several coats of dried blood and clumps of human hair.

As his captors were tying his hands behind his back and around the post, he made a strange request. “Please shoot me in the back,” he pleaded. The six gunmen, three were standing and three lying on the ground, howled with laughter. Their commander, also amused, asked him what crime he had committed. “I did nothing,” Ali told them. “They took me because of my brother.”

“You did not participate in the uprising?” the commander asked. “You are innocent?”

“Yes.”

With that, the commander motioned for his assistants to untie Ali, and told him, “Go home.”

Ahmed, Ali’s brother, calls this the “miracle.” “He did not do this because he is a nice man,” he says of the commander. When Ali returned home, Ahmed left. He turned himself in to the U.S. forces in southern Iraq, setting in motion a process that would see him bounce from nation to nation, and from one refugee camp to another, for the next two years. It was a rotten choice. If he stayed, he would almost certainly have been caught and killed by Saddam’s regime. When he left, he didn’t know if he would ever see his family again.

AFTER LIVING and working for 10 years in Portland, Oregon, that moment is at hand, perhaps within days. It will not be a perfect reunion. His father passed away in 1999. “My father made me a cassette and he’s singing to me and crying and he says he knows he won’t see me again. He says that he’s not worried about me, though. He says he’s proud of me.”

Ahmed pauses and quietly issues a warning. “I am an emotional person,” he says, admitting to a new friend that he struggled mightily coping with his father’s passing. “I had no one to talk to. I got so sick. I started talking to myself.”

After his father died, he planned a trip to Syria to see his mother, two brothers, and sister, and to meet for the first time several nephews and nieces. They stayed for five weeks, trading stories and remembering their times together in Iraq. Ahmed learned then that his family deliberately spread rumors about his fate when he fled in 1993. They told everyone who asked and many others who didn’t that he was killed in action–not wanting to risk further retribution from the local Baath party and Saddam’s henchmen.

Ahmed is grateful today that he saw his mother in 1999. Shortly before he left for training in mid-January, he received word from his sister that his mother has cancer. “Lung cancer,” he explains. “The bad kind, not the good kind. How you say it?” Malignant? “Yes, malignant.”

He has had plenty of opportunities to check on his mother, but he’s not sure he wants to hear how she is doing until he returns home. He has relatives in Umm Qasr, the town likely to be the first official stop on his mission in Iraq. “When I get to Umm Qasr, maybe I call from my aunt’s or my cousin’s. If I’m there, I’m doing big thing. I could die too and could be killed in action. I don’t know how I’m going to act. It’s going to be the happiest day of my life if I call and they say ‘Here, talk to your mom.'”

Ahmed is here now on the Iraqi border with the Free Iraqi Forces, a group of Iraqi exiles that has returned to their country to help in its liberation. His family is expecting him. They don’t know exactly what he’s doing, but they know he’s coming to see them.

In Syria, in 1999, he devised a way to communicate with his brother. They spoke in code for years, worried that the government was eavesdropping on their conversations. Whenever Ahmed mentioned the name of the local Baath Party official who narced on him in 1991, the brothers agreed, it meant he was talking about Saddam’s regime. It was time to collect a debt.

On January 14, Ahmed called his brother. “I’m going to get my money from [the Baath Party leader], he’s in Germany,” Ahmed said, referring elusively to the training he was to receive in Europe. “And [Ali] knew exactly what I mean. I asked him, ‘You got it?'”

“We’ll help you get the money,” said Ali. “That guys owes everyone lots of money.”

So Ahmed moves forward today with a civil affairs unit. The Iraqi exiles trained with the U.S. military for a month at an air base in Taszar, Hungary, before coming here with many of those U.S. servicemen. The trainers are a hodgepodge group of combat veterans and national guardsmen, characters all. They have given most of the Iraqis nicknames. Ahmed is “George,” because he bears a striking resemblance to pop icon George Michael. He keeps his potentially thick beard at a cool two-days growth, and sports a gelled, Caesar haircut. Put Ahmed in some ripped Levis and he’s a dead-ringer for the former Wham! singer.

These days, though, he sports a standard-issue brown Army T-shirt and “chocolate-chip” desert fatigues, U.S. military leftovers in the first Gulf War. Many of his FIF comrades have already been sent forward, integrated with top American units such as the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force and the 101st Airborne. Others are waiting, eager for the day they receive word they’ll go further into their native country. Their job will be to calm the Iraqi people, to explain the mission, to lay the groundwork for the huge humanitarian effort to come, to reassure small pockets of a frightened population. It is a job they take very seriously.

“I’m going to be proud if they think I am an American soldier,” Ahmed says. “I have no fear to go there. I believe we live one life and we die one time. And if I die, I die for a good cause. For my family and for my people.”

Ahmed carries a picture of his girlfriend around his neck. He shows it with evident pride and recalls seeing her for the first time at a Starbucks in Beaverton, Oregon. He shares his memories of the giddy days of new love–playing pool and bowling, making eggs at 2:00 a.m., seeing “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”

He and several Iraqi friends gathered regularly at the Beaverton Starbucks to talk about life, politics, and recently of course, this war. Some of them didn’t share his enthusiasm for the mission. None of them wants to keep Saddam in power, but several of his friends don’t approve of his willingness to go fight with U.S. troops. The normally soft-spoken man becomes very animated. He dismisses their criticisms, calling them “cowards.”

“Let me ask you a question–why the American people, why the American solider have to die in our homeland? I say, we have to die there. So I said to them, [he points] you and you and you, you have to volunteer so less American people go. If you are American solider, you go to Basra, why you have to die there?”

So Ahmed moves forward today. He’ll be home soon.

Stephen F. Hayes is staff writer for The Weekly Standard.